


where you are you and i stay me

by girljustdied



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-27
Updated: 2018-02-27
Packaged: 2019-10-03 07:32:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17279717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/girljustdied/pseuds/girljustdied
Summary: is it destruction that you require to feel?





	where you are you and i stay me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [firstaudrina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstaudrina/gifts).



> prompt was "things you said when you were crying."

There’s a spot above the line of her left collar bone. If she presses a thumb into it, tears blur her vision. It’s instant, and forceful; her throat closes and her mouth gasps open for air.

She cannot remember when it started.

It feels like turning—the times when her disposition tastes bitter in her mouth or her heart weighs heavy with words she cannot voice. Times when the change is less voluntary and more an expression. She pictures her brother’s thumb in the soft spot of her head when she was a baby, too young to remember. Maybe then. Or hands she does recall: Jordan’s, gripping her roughly by the shoulders and shoving her down to the pavement.

When she and Jace have sex for the first time, she holds him by the wrists and he lets her. The moon is a waning crescent. She cries out again and again after trapping his hands under her skirt and letting go. Waking naked in her bed the next morning feels like coming to in the woods, leaves in her hair and limbs sore but lungs full.

It’s good to know.

-

The night Valentine is put down for good is wild with celebration. The Hunter’s Moon and everyone in it sticky with champagne mist. There’s no bar dividing her from the crowd—she’s kissing Simon, she’s toasting the future with her pack, her friends. She’s spinning.

She’s distracted.

When Simon exits the party early, her senses open up. The muscles of her jaw are weary. Her smile dips. It takes no effort to detect Jace now, the pressure of his gaze, his scent easy to identify even in the crush of bodies. 

Things she will never tell him: she likes the smell of his skin. The singe of runes burned in, his sweat. It curls into her, fills her chest, her mouth. Nights with hands between her thighs she swears it’s still in her sheets. After, she detects no trace of him. 

There had been a time when every cord of pain she’d pulled at revealed Jace tangled up in it by the ankles. The cause of all her troubles. But reaching him only exposed more thread. Valentine at the end. 

Valentine, the end.

Jace regards her with a worn sadness, and curiosity. Like he expects her to know better. It’s never over, the corners of his mouth tell her. It lives in you.

“You guys look good together,” he offers instead. 

She drifts by with a light agreement and tries not to eavesdrop on the tense, short conversation he has with Clary before exiting the bar. Lasts ten minutes before she’s making an excuse to follow. 

The sight of Jace on his knees on the sidewalk outside, eyes fixed on his hands resting palms up on his thighs, does not startle her. Still, she curses the pull of her instincts, and wishes for an empty street. Nothing but the cool night air around her. Can tell he feels her presence by the way his posture stiffens, shoulders pulling back. 

“You’re hoping I’ll pretend I didn’t see you?” she kids. It would have been simple to do. Keep her mouth shut. Slip back into the bar and let the door click shut between them. When he doesn’t answer, “Jace?”

The sound barely reaches her hypersensitive ears: “I’m fine.” 

“You don’t look it.” 

He’s not drunk, or sick. He stands lithely, tosses a glance over his shoulder as he moves to take off, and tells her, “I’m fine. Forget it.”

She watches his figure disappear as he turns in the direction of the Institute a few blocks up. Closes her eyes then, and listens to his footsteps. 

-

When things go sour with Simon, she borrows a car and drives upstate. Rents an Airbnb in a deserted patch of woods. It’d been too long since she had last felt her muscles contort and bones crack. She daydreams of a mind preoccupied with the rustle of the underbrush, and doesn’t bother to stock the kitchen or bring anything to pass the time with.

Sadness was a powerful trigger. She’d told Simon that, once. Gretel had told her.

She hikes for hours, sweat gathering in her underarms and the small of her back. Lies down in a small clearing long past dusk. Her weight digs into the earth, heavier than she is. As if a hand was laid flat on her chest, pushing her down. Air hisses out through her mouth. Nothing happens.

Finds herself standing in the nearest gas station a thirty minute drive away, perusing their paltry bestselling paperbacks section. Opens a bag of jerky and eats under flickering fluorescent lights. 

“Are you all right?” the clerk pries, her stare fixed on the scars on Maia’s neck. 

Should have worn a scarf, or hoodie pulled up over her hair. Growls, “Do I not look all right to you?”

The woman huffs a “sorry” and completes the transaction without further comment.

The stack of books in the passenger seat are more welcome companions. Used to take them two at a time to school as a kid, or up the sturdiest tree in her backyard, or, for a short phase, under the bottom shelf of the linen closet. Her seated frame just fit. She’d tug down a quilt and fall asleep there with a thumb pressed into the spine of whatever she’d been reading. Her brother had made sure she grew to hate those types of spaces. To fear being alone.

Should have come with a few members of her pack. A new fling, even. Feels young, sitting by a window with a book in her lap. 

The trip had been structured around a blue moon. When that night comes and she feels a familiar prickle underneath her skin, she strips and stands naked in the backyard. Her body cannot resist this night. The shift is a howl instead of a sob wrenched from her breast.

Painful all the same.

-

There is a dreamy quality to the Hunter’s Moon on a rainy night. Just her, and Jace bringing in the downpour to sit across the bar, and enough quiet to highlight a ringing in her left ear.

“Tell me a story,” he breaks the spell. Catches the bottle she opens and slides across the countertop to him, but doesn’t drink.

“After all this time, how can you still not understand the bartender-patron dynamic? You blather on about your problems and I pretend to patiently listen.” She waits in vain for his mouth to tug up into a lopsided grin. Takes in the wet hair hanging over his furrowed, overserious brow. Reminds her of the first time they met.

“I’d really rather listen to someone else talk.” 

He’d sought her out. Someone isn’t anyone, it’s her. “Why?”

“I like the sound of your voice. I still barely know you. I need the distraction.” Then, tossing aside any liability to those sentiments, “Pick one.”

Deadpans, “Just one?”

He takes a long gulp of beer, fingers loose around the neck of the bottle. “Take the whole bouquet, if you want.” 

Cheeks hot, she continues to attempt their status quo. “Shouldn’t you be out hunting shadows?” 

“It’s my night off.”

“What a concept.” Pours herself a double shot of tequila, holds it up to cheers, “Jace, seriously, what is going on with you?”

His answer is surprisingly sincere: “I don’t know.” Clinks the lip of his bottle with her shot glass, a faint smile finally pulling at his features, “What’s going on with you? How’s the breakup with Simon?”

“Fine.”

“Cool,” the word drawn out, he laughs without laughing, and drinks.

She had talked it through with Luke, with Bat, and even, embarrassingly, with Simon himself. There was nothing left to say. Still, “I knew that I wasn’t his first choice. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that I wasn’t his second.”

“It was a shitty thing,” he gives her. “Him and Izzy. I’m sorry about that.”

“Did you know?” The thought pricks at her calm.

“No.”

“Then don’t be sorry.” Leans towards him, voice lowering despite how alone they are. “Honestly, the worst part was,” she pauses. Wants to tell him to forget it. Wants to forget it. Jace studies her face, doesn’t speak. It’s persuasive. “Being someone’s be all end all, I’ve had that. And I’d hoped that the next time around love would hurt less, take less from me. That what I had with Simon was safer, sort of. And it was. I was right. So, that’s good.” Her voice turns small, “Right?”

“I don’t know.” He looks down at her hand on the bar near his like he might reach out and hold it. “I feel like there’s gotta be something between—” a frown, and, “I don’t know, Maia.”

“What you and Clary have—” 

His gaze darts to the front door, distracted, as if someone had just entered. Stops the conversation short. 

She reaches out with her senses. Raindrops, the rumble of the subway six blocks away, a woman singing from an apartment a few floors up, mice in the dry pantry. He rises and steps back from the bar, silent as he turns towards the spot his gaze is fixed on. Draws his seraph blade.

“What’s there?” she asks despite being certain that nothing is. He doesn’t acknowledge her question, is unresponsive to her ducking under the bar flap to follow him. “I don’t think—”

He’s a blur of movement, already across the rest of the length of the bar and yanking the door open, the blade ready to strike at shoulder level.

“I killed you once, I’ll do it again,” his body vibrating with fury. 

“Jace!” she shouts, trying to get his attention. It flicks back to her and is gone in an instant.

“I’m not going to let that happen—”

“Jace!” She knows better than to touch him, knows how she would react in the same situation, but can’t think of another way to snap him back to reality. Grasps his right forearm enough to be felt. Doesn’t try to force any movement. He twitches but doesn’t fight her off. “Hey, listen to me, there’s nothing there.” When he stills, she tries again, “Do you hear me?” 

He’s miles away, but docile, “You don’t understand.”

“What did you see?” 

“You don’t understand.”

His right arm drifts to his side. She holds on, even as his body slumps back against hers. Wraps her free arm around his waist to hold him up. Drags him back into the bar and locks the door behind them.

“Sorry,” he tells her, tremors racking though his limbs as she dumps him into a chair. “Sorry.”

She waits for the shaking to stop. Waits some more.

“As much as I don’t want to be involved in whatever the hell is going on with you,” a sigh, and she knows she’s too invested, “I think you came here to tell me all about it. Am I wrong?”

“I guess we know one another better than I thought.”

-

She dreams of city streets crumbling into the edge of a dense forest. The pavement cracked, buildings collapsed into nature. Stalks a man through familiar Brooklyn blocks, then the thin trails between trees. He moves like he’s asleep, slow but insistent. Her own steps unsteady, she smells blood in the air. Touches her throat. 

Oh.

She wipes her blood on the trunk of a tree; the bark is rough on her palm. Light from the moon barely penetrates the canopy of leaves and branches. Cannot tell the difference between her blood and the shadows. 

It’s Jace, the gold hair a ribbon of light. Impractical for his line of work, she’s wanted to tell him, more than once. The distance melts between them, her steps stumbling over uneven ground and tree roots until the flat of her right foot is against the back of his knee. With a forearm spanned against the small of his back, she shoves him down into the earth with a grunt. Pins him there with the full weight of her body. He doesn’t struggle. 

“Wake up,” she begs, his hair in her mouth.

His breath quickens, arcs up into a panic, so she grips him by the shoulders and digs the ball of her left foot into the dirt for leverage.

“Something’s out there,” he pants. Twists to try and meet her eyes. “Listen—”

“I know.”

“Maia—”

Cries, “I know.”

They fumble until he’s on his back, her knees digging into the inner bend of his elbows to hold onto him. There’s a wolf in the woods. If she blocks out Jace’s labored breathing, his feet scrabbling to kick out from under her, his sweat—

She wills her hands to not grow claws, to stop the beginnings of a shift, eyes burning. Declares, “We need to get out of here.”

“It’s two against one,” he doesn’t understand, “it’s you and me—”

“I don’t want to kill him,” she says, “I don’t want his ghost.”

Wakes up. 

-

Her phone buzzes, long bleats. A call, not a text. The blackout curtains are doing their job—she has no sense if it’s light or dark out, only that her body is exhausted from a late night at the Hunter’s Moon, her eyes crusted over with sleep.

She groans a greeting.

“Hey.” Jace’s voice. “You up?”

Would laugh if she had the energy. Not an emergency, just a Shadowhunter’s behind-the-times version of a “u up” text. Almost disconnects; a lazy thumb curves around the rim of her cell but doesn’t circle in.

“Who is this?” The sheets pull against her as she stretches her limbs. “What time is it?”

He only answers the second query: “I have no idea.”

Taking the phone away from her ear, she shouts toward the speaker as she fumbles to check the time, “I swear, if it’s before noon I’m gonna murder you—” It’s one thirty-two, “One thirty, lucky you.”

“Oh, good,” he scoffs, “I was shaking in my boots.”

“Tell the truth—are you calling from a landline right now?” Pictures a corded phone in his room at the Institute not unlike the one she had as a teenager. 

“I’m downstairs.”

The reality is sobering. She sits up, one foot touching down to the floor. The wood carries a chill despite the overactive radiator clanging away in a corner of her studio. “Why?”

“It’s been one week.” No hallucinations, no seizures. No somnambled attempts to kill the love of his life. “Wanna go on a celebratory bender with me?”

“It’s one thirty,” she reprises. Knows that this also means a week without Clary. He’d broken it off to protect her, to protect himself, and it was working. So far.

“There’s a saying for that, isn’t there? Or is it a rule?” 

Mutters, “The phrase is ‘it’s five o’clock somewhere,’ which I never understood. By that logic it’s also nine A.M. somewhere. And still,” she checks her phone again, “one thirty-six right here.”

“So, that’s your excuse?” he mutters.

Her guard flashes up, “I don’t need an excuse. If I don’t want to go, that’s enough. Understand?”

“Yeah.” Then, “I really didn’t mean it like that. I don’t expect—”

“Look, no need to get mushy, Shadowhunter.”

Jace goes soft on her anyway. “You’re the only one that knows. About everything.”

He’s not just talking about his second shot at life, or what it’s costing him, or the broken bones and dead pets, the nightmares. 

“He taught me everything I know about combat,” he’d told her at the plot of land where Valentine had been unceremoniously buried. He was very drunk, and she was not. “I can’t just cast it all away. I need it.”

“I know.”

-

It takes six glasses broken by her grip, two walls marked by her claws, and the price of a sink she’d accidentally cracked in half in the bathroom of her favorite Thai restaurant to admit that something is wrong. The moon is a quarter full. Control of her strength should be simple. 

Most nights alone in bed she feels that familiar pressure on her chest and cries, trying to relieve it.

“Well, Mercury is in retrograde,” Magnus informs her. There is amusement in his gaze, but also an edge of knowledge that borders on judgment. “But I have the sense that it might just be the Shadowhunter company you’ve been keeping lately.” 

“You’re one to talk.”

“Fair,” he drinks, “fair.”

Jace suggests running. Outside. As a hobby.

“I’m more of a videogames and fantasy novels kind of girl.”

He grins, “Good to know.”

“What?”

“I’d always wondered what the attraction was—” he checks in on her reaction before continuing, then doesn’t. The trademark grin dims.

She wonders what her tell is. A flash of green in her eyes, or maybe a movement in her hips that changes her stance. “To Simon, you mean. You can say it.”

“Don’t have to now.”

“He’s got six pack abs and can talk _Blade Runner_ ,” and could be into her just the right amount, when he’d wanted to. “What’s not to like?”

“Ah, yes, the abs,” he gives her. “I let him bite me one time, and it was all I could dream about for weeks.”

“Oh my god,” a long laugh bursts out. She covers her mouth to stop it but can’t, winds up breathless and wheezing after.

“See? You obviously need the extra exercise.”

It becomes a routine. Tuesdays and Thursdays they jog through the expansive park near the Institute. She takes pleasure in a strain on her muscles that has nothing to do with turning, and although it’s not a race between the two of them—it always is. She wins half the time. It’s enough. The winding paths grow full of familiar faces and sights. Old men playing chess near the water fountains. The low hanging tree branch she learns to duck under without reducing her speed. The large rock formation she’d once seen a couple rounding second base atop, passersby be damned.

The last thing she expects to see is Jordan. 

Palms on her thighs, winded, grinning with victory, and there he is. Standing near the oak tree she uses as a visual marker for two miles. He looks the same. Long brown hair pulled into a loose ponytail, deeply tanned skin, skateboard in hand.

“Hey, Maia.”

She’s out of her body. Recognizes Jace’s eyes on her, reading her, more than she can fathom what’s going on inside her own skin. His gaze flits to any small movement: the clench of her jaw, the set of her shoulders, her labored swallow. When he turns his attention to Jordan, she finds it in herself to speak.

Croaks, “Hi.”

Silence pulls taut between them, forces Jace to pipe up his own introduction. “Hey, I’m Jace.”

Jordan doesn’t spare him a look. Locked into a determined stare with her, states, “Man, it’s been a long time.”

Lips parted, no sound comes out. Her mouth is dry. She takes a step back, closer to Jace. Stiffens at the sound of Jace’s voice, far less amicable:

“And you are?” 

“Jordan,” he answers simply. As if the name was not a weight in her. As if she didn’t have the scars to prove it. “Maia was my,” he pauses, chews the inside of his cheek as if he’s searching for the most precise word, “girlfriend. Back in the day.” 

Jordan had told her, after the first time they’d had sex, “You're mine now. You'll always be mine.” And then, blood everywhere, certain she was going to die, he’d told her, “You're mine now. You'll always be mine.”

She steels her spine and manages a voice that holds just a slight quiver. Doesn’t meet Jordan’s eyes, instead focuses on a spot just behind him. “Did you follow me here?”

He’s visibly injured by the implication, “I came to the city looking for a new pack. A new home. You know what it was like back in Jersey. Not gonna lie, though, it’s nice to see you.” 

Jace’s nails scrape lightly against her knuckles. The breath stuck in her chest gusts back out as she twists her wrist to grasp his hand, their fingers interlocking tightly. “Jace is—Jace and I are dating.”

Jordan’s lip curls, “A Shadowhunter, really?”

“Yeah, a Shadowhunter,” she snaps.

“And if you think she hasn’t told me everything about you,” the words aren’t a threat, but the ice in Jace’s tone is, “you are dead wrong. I suggest you leave. Now.”

Jordan shoves the hand without a skateboard in his pocket and looks away with a huff. Takes a breath, then another, and calmly responds, “It’s cool, I’ll leave you two alone. But I’m gonna be around. And, Maia, I really hope we can talk.”

Chin to chest, she listens to the sound of him shifting his weight, then leaving without another word. 

With Jordan gone, panicky tears well in her eyes with a suddenness that alarms her. She lets go of Jace to wipe at them as they spill over her lashes with rapid swipes of both hands. The saltwater is hot on her fingertips. 

“Jordan—” She has never spoken a word to Jace about that relationship with any specificity, or about the way she was turned—about any of it. “Jordan is—”

“You don’t have to tell me.” 

The crying hitches into sobs, “Good.”

“You think he knows where you live?” The words are all business, but the lines of his face are soft. Tender.

“Probably.”

“What do you want to do?”

The tears dry up, leaving in their wake a dull headache and the muscles of her face stressed to the point of pain. “I want to go home.”

-

She holds one of four ceramic plates she owns. It’s a burnt yellow, and free of any chips or scratches. Its main purpose is to heat old takeout in the microwave with. On one occasion, she and Gretel had made a runny beef bolognese and served it on this, or one of its twins.

Says the words to an empty room: “I want to smash this plate.”

Shatter it, and everything else that she can. Snap her bones with a shift and break down her own front door from the inside.

Doesn’t.

-

“So, this is how the other half lives.” 

Jace’s room in the Institute is massive. Despite all evidence to the contrary, she had imagined more Spartan quarters. Shadowhunters were raised to be warriors. If Jace was to be believed, he’d been killing demons before age ten. There is a warmth in the rugs lining his floor, the unmade bed, the fireplace. 

He doesn’t move to tidy the area, but does add a log to the fire. “You’ve been in the building before.” 

“I’ve been in the dungeon,” she bites back. “You don’t think the stained glass is a bit much?”

“I guess I’m used to it.” 

He’d snuck her in—as much as anyone could sneak a Downworlder through the system of runed checkpoints. Felt necessary. She trails her fingertips along the wall at hip level, dipping into the spaces between the bricks. It’s cool to the touch. Grounds her. “Sheds a whole new light on how you must have seen my apartment.” 

A smirk, and, “I wasn’t really thinking about the space at the time.”

“How about now,” she presses. “Describe it.”

He stills a few steps from her, cocks his head, and responds like a soldier, “Kitchen to the left, twin bed straight ahead, bathroom to the right. Three exits: the door, the window to the fire escape, the skylight.” The skylight is why she’d chosen the six floor walk-up, despite how cramped it was, despite the mold in the bathroom and the grime in the kitchen that had proved impossible to scrub out. “Books and clothes everywhere. Easy to trip over if I recall correctly. Dishes in the sink, rinsed. Like you didn’t want to wash them but didn’t want the smell of old food either.” He shakes his head, and finally answers her real question, “It’s small. That’s what you want me to say, right?”

“I want you to be honest.”

“It’s small.” Then, shrugging, “I get why you spend so much time out of it.”

Scowls, “I’d tell you how much the rent for it was, if I didn’t already know how little money means to you.”

Werewolves lived human lifespans. They didn’t amass wealth like warlocks, or vampires. They weren’t funded by ancient religions, or magic. They survived. They spent over half their wages on a hole in the wall a stone’s throw from an aboveground subway.

“Hey,” he jolts her back into the room with him. “Are you trying to start a fight with me?”

Breathless, worked up—maybe she was. “Is it working?” 

He answers with a careful “no,” and means it. “It’s kind of depressing.”

“Well, I definitely don’t want your pity.” Her skin hot, she proclaims, “This was a mistake. I’m leaving.”

“Okay.”

“I’m going home,” she reiterates. “Moment of weakness officially over.”

“Fine.”

Two strides forward and she’s kissing him, hands on his face, sliding up along the line of his jaw. With little hesitation, he circles her waist with both arms and crushes her to his body so firmly her heels lift off the floor. Opens his mouth against hers in a hot, flustered exhale. 

Feels so good she has to stop. Slings both arms around his neck, buries her face in his chest, and stills, breaths irregular at first before evening out. Her feet drop back down.

“Okay,” she says into the fabric of his sweater. “Moment of weakness officially-officially over.”

He lets her go before she has a chance to push him away. Steps back, lips pressed into a tight line. Doesn’t speak.

“Before, I didn’t care about—I didn’t care about what you were going through with Clary. I mean, I was pissed and all, but then I just wanted to get off. Now,” she trails off, no way to admit to their growing friendship that wouldn’t embarrass her.

“It’s complicated,” he finishes.

She stays the night. The bed is large enough that two feet of space separate them. It smells like him. She closes her eyes. 

“Maia?” his voice sounds out at a normal volume. He knows she’s awake.

She hums a response. Imagines stars behind her eyelids, and listens to the low, troubled timbre of his voice:

“I’m not in love—” he cuts himself off, strains to find different words— “I mean, how many obstacles do Clary and I have to deal with before enough is enough? It just turns sour at some point, and even if the feelings are still there—it’s not the same.” He tucks the arm nearest to her behind his head. “It stops being about a connection and becomes something else. I don’t know.” 

“Habit?” she offers, voice hoarse.

“Like a story we tell each other.”

-

Maia does not patrol with Jace. She does not patrol with a Shadowhunter because she does not assist in the policing of her own people. 

She does walk with him, though, nights when she can’t sleep. The door in the lobby of her building opening and closing at all hours, footsteps on the stairs—she obsesses over them. Waits for a sound at her door. Has nightmares about the click of a lock turning that she hasn’t had in years. Not since she left home.

“How long does it take you to climb them all?” Jace had asked her, once. “Fastest speed you can manage.”

“Thirty seconds.”

“Then count to thirty-one.”

This tactic works, mostly. 

All her years as Downworlder and she had never glimpsed a demon. It’s smaller than she expected. 

“Come on, I’m scarier than that, right?”

His body is joyful when poised for a fight. “Yeah, sure you are.”

The demon is an eight foot tall mass of thrashing tentacles, thick spikes at the ends. She crosses her arms and watches Jace work. Light on his feet, and swift, he hacks away at its limbs, working to expose the head.

“Back up,” his voice brusque, focus on the creature. 

Mouth open to sass him with a “why?” and she immediately discovers the answer: its reach is longer than it appears. It jabs a tentacle in her direction, straight like a spear. Diving in front of her, he takes the hit in his abdomen and drops to the ground like a rock. Sits up halfway to heave his seraph and the blade buries into its partially uncovered face to the hilt. The demon dissolves into dust.

She does not register it all until it’s already over. 

His blood pools onto the road. Difficult to see it in the dark but she can smell it, and feel it as her boot disturbs it to kneel at his side.

“Hey, look at me,” she cups his cheek with one hand. “Do that healing thing—”

“We have to get it out,” he coughs, then grimaces.

“What?”

“The stinger,” he’s calm despite the blood surging through the cracks of his fingers as he tries to apply pressure to stop the flow. “Then I can activate the rune. Can’t let it stay inside me.”

“Why?”

“It’ll—”

She guesses the answer. Interrupts him with a sharp “fuck!”

His face is already taking on a sickly pallor, pulls tight in mounting agony. He collapses back fully onto the concrete.

“Okay.” She can do this. “Okay.”

The veins in his neck pulse, turning black. 

“Do it,” he begs. 

She must have hesitated. His voice snaps her into action. Digging her left knee into his chest, she forces all her weight onto it, her shin holding down his right arm. Then, one hand pulling the skin of his stomach taut, she tears the wound open wider for easier access with the other. 

“Hold on.” She tries to ignore the strangled screams he attempts to trap in his throat, and can’t. “Please don’t pass out.”

He is not still. Struggles against her considerable strength, tears streaking down his cheeks. She knows those, not wrought from emotion but an expression of an overwhelmed body, an afterthought. He grips her thigh with his free left hand, but holds on instead of trying to throw her off. She’ll have bruises later. She’ll live. Shoves her thumb, index, and middle fingers into him, bile rising in her throat. Blood everywhere. Searches out the spike and yanks it out with a high-pitched shout. 

He doesn’t respond, barely conscious at this point. Coughs up dark liquid when she gets up off him to shake him by the shoulders. “Jace!”

A rune on his left bicep shimmers with gold light. So do his eyes, before he squeezes them shut in concentration—or exhaustion. The hole in his belly knits together gradually, but not entirely.

“I can’t,” he pants, “I can’t do more.”

“Please,” she blinks against the blurring her in vision. “Please.”

“I need to rest.”

Her apartment is only a block away, so that’s where she takes him. Throws his arm around her shoulders and carries half his weight herself. Gets him on her back to drag him up the stairs. Six flights, and her body barely registers the exertion, thrumming with adrenaline. Once she’s got him on her bed, it hits her. Her knees dip to the floor, her hands clutching the edge of the mattress barely keeping her upright as she coughs and struggles for breath.

“Thanks.” Jace’s voice.

The room is dark. She hadn’t turned a lamp on. Squints to detect the flutter of his eyelashes. Minutes pass, or hours.

The healing rune ignites again, and she cries.

After:

“You’d make a good werewolf,” she murmurs, not thinking. Her mouth clamps shut with the knowledge that he might not take the observation as a compliment. 

His voice is ragged, “Yeah?”

The muscles in her shoulders and neck loosen, her head lolling to the side. From her place still kneeling on the floor beside the bed, she crosses her arms on the mattress, the backs of her forearms touching his side. “You can handle a hell of a lot of pain. Takes self-restraint. Control of your body.”

“I don’t feel very in control,” he answers. A long stretch of silence dips between them. She listens to his breaths shortening, his chest hitching with suppressed sobs. He scrubs at his face with an unsteady hand. “And as for being able to take the pain—”

“You don’t have to tell me.”

Exhales, “Great.” 

She leans up to rest her head on his chest, half on the bed, facing away from him. His heartbeat grows sluggish. Fills her senses. He smells like copper, and dirt, and the time she’d burned her fingertips with a firecracker on the Fourth of July when she was eleven. She waits for one of them to drift off.

“I have this dream.”

His distress is only just masked. 

“My heart’s struggling to beat around the blade he slid through my ribs. Valentine. If I’d been brought back with the scar to show for it, it would have been clean, precise—he didn’t need to search.” Her fingertips itch to find the sweet spot herself, but keep still. He shifts underneath her, adjusting the arm she’s leaning on. “I dream the knife is longer than it was, passes clean through my body and digs into the earth. Pins me down there. And I breathe, and I bleed, and it becomes the same thing. Do you know what I mean?”

“Yes.” 

Pictures Jace coming to with reddish mud caked to his clothes and skin and under his nails. No idea how he had made it through. It’s a bad habit, how easily she can slot him into her experiences.

She turns her head to face his. Her touch is careful, fingertips threading into his hair as she slides it back from his eyes. “And then?”

“I don’t know.” His lips quirk, “I’m not sure I’m awake yet.”

“Why?”

“You’re being way too nice to me.” He’s not toying with her. 

Her responding glare lacks heat. It’s hardly a glare in the first place. “I’m a nice girl.”

His gaze locks with hers and holds, “I don’t need you to be.”

“Yeah, well, good thing I don’t exist to serve your needs.” The hand in his hair tightens instinctively, pulling—

“Better.”

She lets go, but doesn’t pull her fist away entirely. It stills over his body as if she’s holding back a punch. “You scared the shit out of me.”

He smiles. “I know.” 

She grinds her fist into his chest, willing it to bruise as she maneuvers up to kiss him. Slots a leg between his as she pulls more fully onto the mattress, and bites at his lips until his mouth opens against hers. He gasps once, then twice, breath thin, but does nothing to change their position. Arches up against her, the leg between hers lifting to brush against her. She takes the friction with a sigh of relief. They grind against each other, bodies molding together and kisses messy, content to land anywhere.

“Why?” she tangles her free hand in his hair again and yanks until he groans. “Why can’t you want it nice?”

“Why can’t you?”

She does. She did. “I don’t know.”

Her fist on his chest opens, fingertips curling over his collar bone and blunt nails digging in. She licks the tear that escapes from the corner of his eye. Tastes like how the ocean does, in her dreams. Salt and sand and seaweed, more dry than wet, mouth full with it. 

He thumbs open the button of her jeans, and they struggle together to get her out of them. Caked with blood, the fabric clings to her, pulls at her skin.

“Careful,” she says, and he is.

“Come up here,” he entreats, and she does. 

Straddles his face and shivers at the ghost of the heat of his breath. At the first touch of his mouth, his tongue, she thrusts down against him forcefully. Wants more, and knows he can take it. The bridge of his nose to his chin buried in her cunt, he grinds back up. Licks into her, his face stroking the lines of her. She closes her legs tightly around his ears to feel him struggle. His shoulder rotates as he fights to get his right hand between her thighs. Penetrates her with a finger, mouth canting up to suck firmly at her clit. 

She needs this feeling to last but comes apart within minutes. 

Tries to pull away after, shaking, but he reaches out to circle her thighs with both arms and forces her back into the caress of his tongue, more gentle now, knows her clit is oversensitive from too much contact. Pumps two fingers into her, slow at first and then at a rapid pace, bouncing her body until she’s ready again to widen her legs and crush down against his mouth again, palms bracing against the wall for support. Rides out a second, longer orgasm, the journey like the sharp dips of a rollercoaster. Cries out again, and again. Pulls off him to collapse next to him on the bed. 

She drags her hand down his body slow, touches the space where the wound in his stomach had been. “Does it hurt?”

“A little.”

Her hand moves again, careful, searching. Her index and middle fingers trace the spaces between his ribs. Stop over his heart.

“Ask me,” he rasps.

“Does it hurt?”

“Yes.”

She takes his right hand in both of her own, their skin stained with blood. Brings his thumb over the curve of her left collar bone, and presses in.

  



End file.
